Modularity, product innovation, and consumer satisfaction: An agent-based approach

Abstract

The importance of modularity in product innovation is analyzed in this paper. Through simulations with an agent-based modular economic model, we examine the significance of the use of a modular structure in new product designs in terms of its impacts upon customer satisfaction and firms` competitiveness. To achieve the above purpose, the automatically defined terminal is proposed and is used to modify the simple genetic programming. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.